REDOAK

I finally managed to get out and drink some beer on Friday night. In the craziness that has been the last few weeks I have had little time to drink beer let alone write about it. The destination was Redoak Boutique Beer Cafe on Clarence Street. I arrived a little ahead of my mates and had a swift half of the Organic Pale Ale (4.5% abv) which was good but hardly spectacular. I followed this by a half of their Belgian Pale Ale that was even better although didn't taste anything like any beer I had encountered in Belgium! I suppose it was trying to be a take on something like Kwak, but it kind of misses the mark. Friday also saw the arrival of a new member to the Redoak lineup, an IPA which one the 'World's Best IPA' at the World Beer Awards, UK (31 July 09). The beer was good, weighing in at 6.5% abv but was overly sweet and not really to style. As I have never heard about these particular awards before, I'm not sure if its genuine or just marketing spin. Anyhow the price of this beer is ridiculous and a pint set me back $13.50, which is about twice the price an equivalent beer would cost in London. Anyhow after the IPA I moved on to a couple of other venues and had some Little Creatures and Coopers Pale Ale and got pretty smashed before returning to Redoak for a (OK, I had two) nightcaps of their Robust Porter (6.5%). Overall I like Redoak as the beer is exceptional, however their prices are ridiculous. Given their location is at the fringe of the financial district - paying a premium is to be expected, but $13.50 a pint is taking the piss. But while the punters are willing to pay, I can't blame them for overcharging - the place was rammed.

About Redoak;
"Australia’s most awarded boutique beer café opened its doors in Sydney in mid 2004 and serves a range of boutique premium beers accompanied by a menu of exquisite cuisine. Redoak Brewery has had outstanding successes at the 2004 -2008 Australian International Beer Awards and has been Australia's most awarded brewery for the third consecutive year in 2007 and won 'Champion International Small Brewery' at AIBA 2008.

David started brewing beer at the age of 14 when he created his first ginger beer. He developed a passion for brewing beer in his teens and always dreamed of brewing a range of premium beers for the Australian market.

Over the years he developed his own unique methods of brewing specialty beers and has used these, along with some more traditional methods, to create the range available in the Redoak Boutique Beer Café.

Redoak’s unique beer styles

Redoak’s signature beer is the Framboise Froment, which is brewed in Belgian style with fresh raspberries infused resulting in intense flavours and aroma. This beer took home Gold and Best in Class medals at the 2004 awards and is proving highly popular with both men and women.

Another favourite is the Redoak Belgium Chocolate Stout, which is Australia’s first fully Belgian chocolate beer made by infusing Redoak’s Oatmeal Stout with the finest dark Belgian chocolate. David has also created another Australian first in the Redoak Belgium Choc-Cherry Stout, in which fresh cherries are used to create a luxurious sweet sensation.

Complementing the exotic premium range is the Redoak Organic Pale Ale, which was created using some traditional English brewing methods and only certified organic grown malt and hops. Redoak is the first brewery in New South Wales to create organic beers and the first in Australia to brew organic pale ale.

The Redoak Brewery currently brews over 40 premium beers, of which 20 are available at any one time at the Redoak Boutique Beer Café. Redoak was the first brewery in Australia to brew more than 10 of its own beers and has subsequently extended it's range of beers considerably.

All beers are created using only the highest quality ingredients, contain no additives, preservatives or added sugars. Redoak beers are not pasteurised and are served fresh.

Redoak matches premium beer with fine cuisine

In addition to premium quality beers, Janet and David offer a menu of exquisite gourmet cuisine, developed together with Head Chef Chris Beard as the perfect accompaniment to the Redoak beer range.

Diners at the Redoak Boutique Beer Café can choose from a selection of tempting dishes made with quality ingredients. Redoak has specially combined food and beer to create a unique experience for the customer. Janet Hollyoak said, “Each dish uses carefully selected premium Australian produce and is complimented with a unique beer style to provide the diner with a unique tasting experience.”

Redoak has created a beer appreciation course to take customers through the brewery history, process and special qualities and characteristics that define a premium beer. Customers can then enjoy the fine cuisine complimented by a Redoak beer, while being taken through the individual flavour and aroma profiles of different beer styles.

The Café also offers unique Tasting Boards – the first of their kind in Australia. The Tasting Boards each hold four canapé style dishes that are matched with four different Redoak premium beers. The boards are designed to enable diners to experience the unique cuisine and premium beers. The tastes and flavours of the dishes and beer are enhanced as the diners palate develops when they move across the board.

Janet and David have created a stylish boutique beer café which is uniquely different in many ways to any other drinking or eating establishment in Sydney or across Australia. Every aspect has been put together with the upmost detail. For example, the bar tops are made from 700 year old jarrah timber sourced from West Australia’s famous Fremantle Wool Store and decorated with Italian mosaic tiling."

Off Licence - NY Style

We flew into JFK Terminal 8 and made our first schoolboy error almost immediately. One of my wife's colleagues had told her to get an airport shuttle into town from the transport information desk as it was cheaper. Bad move. It took us an hour an a half to get to our hotel on the Upper West Side. A taxi would have been more direct and cost approx. The same price as they have a fixed cost between JFK and Manhattan. Anyhow, putting this aside we arrived at our digs in the mid afternoon and promptly headed out exploring the Upper West Side (UWS) and Midtown areas before jet lag put my wife out of service. On the way back to the hotel I popped into the NY equivalent of an off licence to pick up some booze. This was a funny experience as I was carded by a kid who must not have been a day over 16. The fact that I have a large proportion of gray hair and I am on the wrong side of 30 should have been enough, but obviously they roll a little bit differently in the States. So the missus went to sleep and I watched a 'Rock of Love, with Bret Michaels omnibus whilst drinking my purchase.

First up was Magic Hat #9 which is a not quite pale ale. Basically it tastes like your typical west coast US pale ale (Columbus and Cascade) but has an apricot like twang. My guess is that they add apricots to the boil and this adds some flavour to the beer. It's odd and takes a bit of time to get used to, but it's not unpleasant either. I followed this up with a bottle of Blue Point Hoptical Illusion, which is a 6.8% IPA that tasted like bitter pine cones and not much else. It was OK, but not really all that balanced. Blue Point is a small micro based on Long Island New York. Apparently their beers are hard to come by even in NYC, so I guess I was lucky to stumble upon them. I also had a bottle of Blue Point Spring Fling (6.0% abv) which tasted like a balanced and toned down version of the Hoptical Illusion. It had very little aroma and a slightly astringent grass like taste but I guess this is par of the course with these US pale ales. To top off the evening (I was pretty tired at this stage, even though it was probably only 9pm) I had a bottle of Sierra Nevada ESB (5.9% abv). The ESB stands for early spring beer and it's a US interpretation of the English ESB style. It's OK and it tastes like pine cones. I think every beer I had in the US tasted like pine cones! Not necessarily a bad thing, but it gets a bit boring after a while. Anyhow by this stage the hop demon and the alcohol was amplifying my jet lag and I wandered off to bed, but I did manage to see Bret Michaels choose his final two 'love matches'. If only off licences were this good in the UK!

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BTW - Bret Michaels is the former lead singer from '80s hair band Poison. He looks old and hagged and now wears makeup. He is also bald, but uses strategically placed bandanna's and hats to hide the fact that he is wearing a wig. A true hero for all you aging Generation X rockers.

Batemans Victory Ale

Another beer that I picked up from either Morrison's or Tesco - Batemans Victory Ale (6.0 % abv) is a beer brewed to celebrate all things Nelson! And no, we are not talking about Major Nelson from 'I dream of Genie' or Nelson Mandela - we are talking about British Hero Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronté, who led Great Britain to victory against Napoleon at the Battle of Trafalgar. A man of such legend that it is once claimed that he saw the Spanish Navy off the Sussex coast but insisted on completing his game of crochet (with one arm mind you) before sailing out to claim victory.

Anyhow, the beer is a reflection of the man, a strong aromatic pale ale laced with hop character, A good beer that lives up to its name. Also as a trivial side note the Lord Nelson brewpub in The Rocks, Sydney (named after the great man) also has a beer called Victory Bitter. However their version mostly compared VB, which is somewhat disappointing! Their beer is rather splendid as well.

Website

Wentworth Rampant Gryphon

Wentworth Rampant Gryphon (6.2% abv) is a beast of a pale ale. I had mine in the form of Real Ale in a Bottle (RAIB) which was sourced from the Real Ale shop. Now as I said, this is a beast of a beer, its sweet, it has caramel flavours, its bitter its fruity it has just about every taste imaginable in a beer, but it does so and still remains pleasant.This beer is very home brew like, and has some of the esters that you get when you ferment too warm - but in a beer with so much going on you tend to just roll them up with everything else. I enjoyed this beer, but its the sort of pint that you can only have one or two off, its too complicated. It was also cloudy, and murky - probably the cloudiest commercial beer I have come across (including Coopers where the bar maid has swirled and tipped in the dregs). It also had a solid yeast cake at the bottom, so I think the haze maybe protein related rather than yeast in suspension?

The Rampant Gryphon is brewed by the Wentworth Brewery, who are an independent brewery located on the Wentworth Estate in Rotherham. http://wentworthbrewery.co.uk/

Meantime Pale Ale 2

I am not sure if the Meantime Pale Ale I had recently at swish chain bar, Brown's in Covent Garden is the same as the London Pale Ale I had earlier in the year, but I have to say what a refreshing drink! There are some subtle differences, mainly being the hopping, with the draft version I had at Brown's lending more toward a bitter hop flavour than a strong aroma hop flavour which I found in the bottled version. But still it's the kind of beer that jumps out of the glass and shouts "FRESH FLAVOUR" in your face. Browns itself is a pretty classy joint which you should probably check out if you are in the west end. Their beer list is actually quite good for a franchised chain.

Anyhow the most recent tickers opinion on ratebeer is as follows;

"Jun 7, 2007 Updated: Oct 15, 2007 Alongside the decorated Meantime Porter sat the Meantime Pale Ale. It was somewhat diminished in comparison to its red flared cousin, but the outstanding merits of the latter recommended a purchase of the former. It begins with a thin, white wall head lazily atop a red-honey body. The nose is confounding – my notes leave no hints as to what it was like at all. I can only guess that it was so subtle that I couldn't’t venture to evaluate its qualities. The taste, however, was more memorable and measurable. The Meantime Pale Ale plays host to a variety of flavors like honey, apple and lemon in a dedication to Spring. However, these are muted by an overbearing, bulky bitterness. The cause is a slip shod hop flavor balance; the bane of many well intentioned pale ales. The brewers simply flexed the hop character too much. Despite the brutal bitter quality, the palate maintains an elegant feel to it. The carbonation, gravity and flavors, even if they’re a bit off, align beautifully to produce the ideal pale ale tongue texture. All the more pity that the hops had to strong arm the better qualities. I’ll be anxious to try another batch of this in the future, with the hope that somebody has gotten around to tweaking the sweet and bitter."

I couldn't find honey, apple and lemon flavours in mine, but then maybe my palette is not refined enough!

Adnams Explorer

I am slowly starting to get back on top of my posts! Last Saturday I met up with a long lost friend of mine Chris whom lives out in Bethnal Green for a quick crawl around the Victoria Park/Mile End Park area. As the Royal (Hackney side of Victoria Park) was closed for a private function we headed across the park to the newly renovated Crown. This pub has seen a bit of change recently. Originally (ie circa 2005) it was an organic pub, this closed down and was replaced by Tapas bar! That venture failed and the pub has been restored into a modern day gastropub with trendy bookshelves and uber cool cow hide lampshades. The ale selection was a little lacking and we decided to settle for the Adnams Explorer (4.3% abv). Explorer is a British interpretation of a summer ale and has been brewed with American hops (Columbus, Amarillo and Chinook possibly??) The beer is light and similar to the East Green, but makes use of hops sourced in the USA rather than locally. I guess its in a similar vein to James Squire Golden Ale, with elements of an APA, but compromises on the bitterness to effectively make it a pleasing lawnmower beer. Overall I was quite impressed by the beer, but the pub decor leaves a lot to be desired! Oh and the website is here.

Adnams East Green

Adnams East Green Carbon Neutral beer (4.3% abv) recently hit the shelves of my local Tesco and is an amazing Pale Ale and claims to be the first environmentally aware beer from the coast.

This is a beer that I really like. Upon first lifting it off the supermarket shelf I was surprised by how light it is, they have obviosluy gone to the effort of reducing the amount of glass used in production. This accompanied with locally sourced barley and hops have produced a light citrussy session ale, along the lines of an American Pale Ale, but dryer and in a similar vein to James Squire Golden Ale. I have recently aquired another bottle of this and I anticipate that it will be as good as the first! Website here.

Baron's Pale Ale

A relative newcomer to the Australian Beer scene, Baron's Pale Ale (4.6% abv) takes the well established American Pale Ale route and extends the concept by using highly aromatic hops sourced from New Zealand. I had heard rumours about Baron's beers and their growing popularity in the United States and was keen to check out what all the hype was all about. The beer is uniquely bitter, Its unobtrusive, but I think the IBU rating would still be well over 30 IBU's. The aroma is of passionfruit and lychee, but instead of deriving these flavours from Cascade and Amarillo, Baron's have chosen newer hop varieties such as Nelson Sauvin and Pacific Gem to do the job. Due to the beer only being relesed relatively recently, I have been unable to find out too much info. However as always there is a website! Overall, a good balanced beer which I shall crave until I can find it either here in the UK, or when I move back to Australia.

Welsh Pale Ale

Welsh Pale Ale is a 3.7% abv pale ale from the Breconshire Brewery. What was initially a promising looking pint ended up failing to satisfy me. The beer itself is a pale blonde colour similar to most generic pale lagers, and the carbonation is what you would expect from an ale. The problem lies with the taste, or lack of taste! Besides an initial dry malty taste up front the beer tends to have no hop character or bitterness at all and basically felt like drinking a warm Corona.

The beer maintains a spot on the brewery website here: http://www.breconshirebrewery.com/Ales.asp?BeerID=24 and has the following to say.

A pale golden, mildly hopped session ale. This beer has been developed in response to requests for an easy to drink session ale, that was not too bitter, but still retained a full and satisfying flavour. We hope hope you'll agree that the Brewer has met these criteria!

For some reason I agree with this description, but they are using the word mildly a little bit generously. Still there is something wrong and therefore I disagree with what the brewer has created. Why would anybody (excluding teens who drink Smirnoff Ice and WKD) want to drink something that has no taste and no bitterness? Those folk in Wales sure are an interesting bunch.....